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| Photo courtesy of Aislinn Leggett |
This ain't your grandmother's quadrille. Since 1999, Montréal choreographer, dancer and dramaturge Lük Fleury has devoted himself to renovating the traditional Québec gigue (jig).
Mirroring the recent musical renaissance brought about by groups like Les Cowboys Fringants and La Bottine Souriante, this generation of gigueurs are exhuming Québec folklore and breathing new life into it. Fleury, with his dance company Le Fuxi Club, wants to speak to and for a new generation of young Québécois, many of whom grew up in contact with their ancestral music at family reunions or holiday réveillons. This winter as part of the Montreal Highlights Festival, Fleury presented the fruit of his most recent labours at the second BIGICO ("Biennale de gigue québécoise" for the uninitiated,) of which he is also the artistic director.
For two weeks, nine local choreographers delighted capacity audiences at the Tangente dance space, exploring contemporary, urban and even Middle Eastern, Eastern European and South American dance vocabularies, all firmly rooted in the toe-heel-toe-heel tapping of the gigue. Borrowing from electronica and techno music and touching on very of-the-moment themes - homosexuality, immigration, violence - this is gigue redux, and it might shock the kerchiefs off grand-mère's head.
But Fleury insists his intent is not to shock, nor to renounce the roots of Québec folklore: "contemporary gigue still has ties with what came before; it's not a break, but a continuum." Continuum, or collision? The shuffling, stomping feet are firmly planted in their québécois past; the upper bodies use contemporary movement; the choreographic structure is a collage of related duets, quintets and group pieces; the music is something from disco night in the Saguenay.
The advantage of stylistic fusion is that the more artistic languages you speak, the more stories you can tell. Traditional folklore tends to be either manic or melancholy, sprightly or sad, two poles that don't leave much room for our modern multi-culti, technologized realities. Gigue reinventors get to delve into darker, more abstract imagery to bring Québec folklore out of the past and onto a 21st century metropolitan stage, making it accessible to urbanites who are more likely to clack two spoons together in a designer salad bowl than on their knee.
Borrowing from electronica and techno music and touching on themes like homosexuality, immigration and violence, this is gigue redux, and it might shock the kerchiefs off grand-mère's head.
For all their iconoclasm and exploration, however, the dancers of this year's BIGICO don't lose the animation, the giddy pleasure that comes - in any country - with a good traditional stomping romp. They're at their best when they get carried away by the rhythms and the interplay between performers.
Like all popular arts, the gigue needs a gathering place; more than anything, it is about the rencontre - the encounter, the meeting. And, of course, the dancing. "What makes us happy," Fleury explains simply, "is being together and dancing."
They may import disco lights, cha-cha beats, and all the social baggage of the new century, but their roots are showing.
Whether these new hybrids seep into Québec's folkloric fabric, and whether grand-père's fiddle, spoons and clogs find their place on the contemporary dance stage will be determined in the years to come; in the storytelling, drinking, singing and dancing of the next generations' kitchens.
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Katia Grubisic is a writer, editor and translator whose work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Grain Magazine, Books in Canada, and The Fiddlehead, among others, and in a chapbook with Delirium Press. She is on the editorial board of The New Quarterly.
Les danseurs fringants
To learn more about Lük Fleury's company Le Fuxi Club, visit www.fuxiclub.com.
Contemporary dance performances take place regularly at Tangente, 840, Cherrier, (514) 525-5584, www.tangente.qc.ca. |
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